Romance

This chapter offers a genealogical account of Renaissance Romance, looking back to its classical and European forerunners, and on to its later relationships with the novel. It is part of a recent turn against a more traditional (and moralistic) critical hostility to the form and of a recent turn to an appreciation of genre as a social institution. Romance, in the hands of its most significant Renaissance practitioners, is here seen as a literary technology that attempts to re-imagine its various cultures’ forms of affective sociability: both Spenser and Sidney envisage their texts as fashioning new kinds of reader. This aim is pursued largely through the exploration of the potentials and dangers of fictionality, and in particular the linked notions of imagination and errancy. New kinds of narrative are developed within which new structures of feeling may be experienced, and passion accorded value alongside reason.